Haunting images add to horror of locally filmed 'Conjuring'

Published: Thursday, July 18, 2013 at 10:55 a.m.

Last Modified: Thursday, July 18, 2013 at 10:55 a.m.

You can find a list of filming locations at the end of this article

Facts

When you aren't covering your eyes, see if you can find Johnson's creepy oak, Pope's purple orchid or an antique rug from Tabor City featured in one of "The Conjuring's" actions scenes. Tweet us @WilmOnFilm with the hashtag #ConjuringILM if you spot an item, or tell us what you think of the movie at www.facebook.com/WilmOnFilm.

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The knobbed trunk of the gnarled, bent oak curved from the ground, the points of its branches jutting into the mist that clung to the banks of the Black River off Pender County's Canetuck Road when sculptor Katrina Johnson approached the vine-covered arboreal shortly after dawn one day this past spring.

At 40-feet-tall, the splintered beast towered over the five-foot-five, 24-year-old Wilmington woman as she bent to coil another strand of vines gathered from the nearby forest around the tree's vast frame.

Johnson isn't some sort of tree herder or arborist in her spare time. But it was her responsibility to make sure the giant's bark looked "just so" for its upcoming appearance on the silver screen in "The Conjuring," which opens Friday.

"It took on its own character with its vines and branches even as we were building it," said Johnson, lead sculptor for the locally filmed Warner Bros. production directed by James Wan. "It was almost like a hand coming out of the Earth – it fit into the natural environment. It sort of made itself almost."

Well, not exactly.

Johnson and other local crew members spent dozens of hours building the nearly four-ton prop tree at the direction of "The Conjuring's" production designer, Julie Berghoff, who envisioned the twisted old oak for the haunted-house horror show. The eerie tree and a century-old Canetuck Township home that was inspiration for the movie's haunted house are characters in their own right in the supposedly true thriller. They've also been key to the film's marketing campaign and are featured in its poster, which shows the farmhouse and the shadow of a body hanging from a noose under a bent branch of the oak.

"Julie is a really textual person, so her vision was great. The tree was definitely really gnarly," Johnson said. "I'd get out to the house early in the morning, and the mist would come up from the river – it was spooky. When I saw the movie, it was still spooky. But I'm really proud and excited about it all."

A ‘frightening' story

"The Conjuring," which filmed in the region in early 2012, is based on the real-life experiences of couple Ed and Lorraine Warren (played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), who worked as psychic investigators during the 1970s. It's a precursor to 1979's "The Amityville Horror," a case that made the Warrens famous.

The movie filmed at various locations in the Cape Fear region last year, including the Carolina Apartments, the Carolinian Inn and the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Written by Chad and Carey Hayes ("House of Wax"), the New Line supernatural thriller, follows the Perron family (led by parents played by Lili Taylor and Ron Livingston), whose farmhouse is haunted by a witch's spirit.

Finding the perfect spot for filming proved to be a unique challenge for veteran movie location scout Bass Hampton, of Charleston.

"It's a frightening story ... the script alone had me freaking out for weeks," he said. "When scouting for it, I photographed at least 12 abandoned farmhouses. Most of the farmers gave me a key and said, ‘knock yourself out' and sent me in alone. Inevitably, as images from the script were still fresh in my mind, something would happen inside the houses that would send me flying out of the house screaming like a little girl."

Hampton's effort wasn't for naught when filmmakers settled on the Canetuck Road home, which has been featured in productions since the 1980s, homeowner Tom Keith said.

"When you're thinking of an old house on a river around here, it usually comes to mind," Keith said.

The two-story, 5,000-square-foot house sits at the end of a dirt rutted drive about 300 yards past the river's bridge, its white paint peeling from its hundred-year-old frame. With narrow stairways and low ceilings, peeling plaster and all sorts of hidden nooks and crannies, the aging house looks as if it could play host to a spirit or two.

"At first, I thought the film crews would spend a month there, but with more than 100 people and young actors moving back and forth every day to Wilmington, it just wasn't possible," Keith said.

Instead, for convenience sake, production designers decided to build almost an exact replica of the house at EUE/Screen Gems Studios in Wilmington, right down to the uneven wooden porch slats, Keith said.

"I went down to see it at the studio and my jaw dropped," he said. "It was such an exact copy. They even copied it down to all the repairs that have been made on the porch over the years."

‘Plenty of crucifixes'

Although audiences won't have a clue, they'll see a basement in the movie version of the home that doesn't exist in real life and a slew of other special effects and movie tricks staged by the film's actors and stunt crews.

"Julie (Berghoff) came in late 2011 and started looking at the house in Pender County. She talked producers into building the house at the sound stages, so then we could do our own thing," said "Conjuring" set-decorator buyer Tim Pope. "It was a very typical farmhouse, but we needed that basement and to be able to drag people across the floor or around the room."

Filmmakers did just that.

Deep into the second act, one of the Perron's five daughters is dragged through the house form her hair by the witch's spirit.

"We built some tracks on the floor and in the ceiling, and she was attached with cable and climbing wire," special effects supervisor Dave Beavis said. "It was simple stuff, but it had to be built in conjunction with the construction, art, stunt and set decorating department."

The film's sets, including the Warren's home – a house on Forest Hills Drive – feature interiors that are heavy on the retro without being too distinctive because of copyright laws, Pope said.

"Anytime you have a horror film or a haunting scene, you have to make things look generic because it's basically insinuating that everything in the house is demon possessed," he said. "There couldn't be patterns on the china plates or a little bird figurine in the Warren's artifact room, for example, so it was difficult getting some common household items that were interesting enough for the film. There's no copyrights on crucifixes, though, so we had plenty of those."

The work paid off for Pope, who spent thousand of dollars at antique markets from Selma to Tabor City for "The Conjuring's" props.

"It got pretty intense at the end of filming," he said. "There's always those last minute specific things that we need, like a last-minute orchid prop in a certain shade of purple that needs to be tilted just this way. But I'm impressed with how it all came back."

"James wanted to do as much physical stuff as possible, so we can say we went to a lot of trouble to do these effects for the audience," Beavis said. "It was a classic case of a good director knowing exactly what he wanted – we weren't sure exactly how to achieve it, but he trusted and relied on us to do it."

Wan, 36, says he wanted to make a physical horror film that started out small and built in intensity. The director was inspired by classic studio horror flicks of the 1960s and '70s such as "Let's Scare Jessica to Death."

Local cast and crew made that a breeze.

"It doesn't matter how big or small stunts are – I'm a big fan of action – so I was very comfortable doing those kind of set pieces and I had great people surrounding me, so it was very easy," he said. "Everyone in Wilmington made it smooth in terms of what I needed done."

EUE/Screen Gems Studios, 1223 N. 23rd St. Wilmington: Most of the movie was shot here, where a large house set was built.

The Keith House, 405 Canetuck Road, Canetuck: The exterior of this private residence on the banks of the Black River in Pender County served as the haunted house owned by the Perrons in the movie. Most interiors were filmed at Screen Gems Studios.